A Bitcoin wallet that had been dormant for nearly 12 years suddenly moved its entire 20.00010537 BTC balance in March to a large centralized exchange, according to Cointelegraph. The transfer was worth about $1 million at the time. Roughly three weeks later, nearly the same amount came back, with a difference of just 4,500 satoshis, or about $3. In May, the Bitcoin was permanently burned.
Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis said the wallet has a strong "common ownership" connection with four other addresses. All five addresses received their initial funding on the same day in April 2014. Most of the funds can be traced to the now-defunct Mt. Gox exchange, a detail that points to an early Bitcoin adopter.
Bitcoin educator Bennet said one of the addresses sent 19.6 BTC to the custodian in 60 separate transactions between 2022 and 2024. During that span, Bitcoin's price rose by more than four times, yet 58 of the transfers were each close to $10,400 in U.S. dollar terms. That pattern suggests the holder may have been using a fixed-dollar liquidation strategy.
The March round-trip transfer, though, is harder to explain as a standard transaction. After the roughly $1 million transfer out and back, the funds returned almost intact. The later burn also required control of the same private key.
Chainalysis said it cannot currently explain why the holder moved long-dormant assets through a custodian, took back almost the exact amount, and then chose to destroy the coins. Burning Bitcoin is irreversible. Analysts have floated several possibilities, including a public attempt to reduce Bitcoin's total supply, or motives tied to privacy, taxes, or testing an old wallet setup. Chainalysis said none of those theories fully matches all of the onchain evidence.